Amph 60+ Years of James Bond 007

Mr44, who James Bond is isn't something that you can go, "yeah, but he's also a banal middle aged pedophile in a safari suit". Bond is Fleming's creation. People may interpret it, but when all the actors bar one resemble that character you can safely exclude the one who doesn't from being James Bond.

Or, Roger Moore was dreadful and lucked into one decent film, where he was the weakest link.

 

That just seems so overly harsh. I don't know, I'd still say that any of Moore's movies still feel like Bond movies, much more so than any of Brosnan's films, except perhaps Goldeneye. There has to be a reason for that. Note, I've never indicated that Moore is the best Bond, you saw my rankings above. I just think that the weaknesses you are attributing to Moore are the weaknesses inherent to all Bond films.

1)They are very much a product of their times, and are both guided by, and guide pop culture. Back during the 70's and 80's, a night time soap opera called Dallas was the most popular. If you see re-runs, JR Ewing wore safari suits. I don't know if men in real world Dallas actually wore safari suits during that time, but at least in fashion, they must have been cutting edge. James Bond also reflected this in his various periods. I mean, Fleming wrote his first novel in 1953. Certainly in 1975, James Bond would look silly if he was still walking around in a fedora with a black suit and black skinny tie, drinking his strong black coffee with Hoagy Carmichael hair. He'd look like Men in Black, or a caricture of himself. Actually, Fleming's Bond should be Don Draper to a tee, stepping out of a script for Mad Men. But Mad Men is a period piece, while Bond is constantly updating itself for the times. Moore's Bond was a product of the 70's, so he reflected that era (and I'm not just talking about fashion, but the sensability)

which leads to

2)I don't think any of the Bond actors get the creative control they actually want. Brosnan didn't. Dalton didn't. Lazenby didn't. Moore didn't. Did it make sense to cast a Tanya Roberts lusting after Bond who could be her grandfather? Did it make sense to put that ice skater Bibi or whatever her name was? (well, actually, that was more of an authority crush, and Bond did reject her, so it made sense if not creepy) But those are decisions that Moore didn't have the authority to control. All I'm saying is that if we can both look to Tailor of Panama as a backhanded representation of what Brosnan wanted his Bond to be but could never get in the movies, you can also look to the Saint as a representation of when Moore was given creative control as well. The Moore of LALD was much closer to this than the Moore of AVTAK, but again, I think he spent probably 4-5 years, or maybe 2 movies too long in his career. But even his in-between films still very much had that James Bond feel.

 

Moore's films felt more distinctively Bond-movie because they were still relentlessly working the Bond-movie formula. That does not mean that Moore played a good Bond. They're separate things. And the fact that Moore played a suave globetrotting adventurer on The Saint doesn't mean he was suited to play the icy killer James Bond. He could do half of the character, but he couldn't do the most important half, a fact which has been relentlessly established. Moore was not being done a disservice by his scripts -- he was being served by his scripts, and considered it a disservice anytime he had to do anything actually Bondish. It's beyond dispute, just from Moore's own statements alone, that he was not interested in portraying James Bond as he was really meant to be portrayed.

 

Wanna know how I gauge a successful Bond performance? I ask myself: In ten years time, after too many drinks, too many women, too many murders, will this character be putting a gun to his own head?

With (very) early Connery, Dalton and Craig, the answer is a resounding yes.

 

Fun fact: every single one of Moore's Bond films were more profitable or, in the case of A View To A Kill, just about equal in profitability as Skyfall on a cost:earnings ratio. I await the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments...

 

Mendes To Helm Bond 24 & Bond 25?

Supposedly Mendes is a lock for 24 and is likely for 25.

 

Die Another Day (2002)

Behind the scenes

With the two-year release schedule having locked the Bond films into odd-year release dates, the Bond films had missed their ten- and twenty-year anniversaries with films on each side and been stuck in limbo during the thirty-year anniversary. With the next film being the series' twentieth, EON decided to push the film back a year to put the twentieth Bond film out in the year of its fortieth anniversary.

Purvis and Wade returned to write the script, which was packed full of references to prior releases for the anniversary. The title was only the second not derived from any connection to Ian Fleming or his work. Part-Maori New Zealander Lee Tamahori was brought in to direct after his critically acclaimed Once Were Warriors and flops Mulholland Falls, The Edge, and Along Came a Spider (Tamahori later on went on to direct massive flop XXX: State of the Union, Nicolas Cage megaflop Next, and Uday Hussein uberflop The Devil's Double, as well as to be arrested for offering a police officer oral sex while dressed as a woman). Brosnan had lobbied for Brett Ratner to direct, but the producers refused. One of the options considered but not hired was Stuart Baird, who was primarily an editor and went on to edit Casino Royale and Skyfall.

Halle Berry was cast as a Bond girl, a higher-profile actress than was usually cast, and her profile was only increased by the Oscar award she won for her work in Monster's Ball. Her NSA action-girl counterpart to Bond got buzz as a spinoff possibility, but it came to nothing. Her fame was balanced by the secondary Bond girl, twenty-three-year-old Rosamund Pike, recruited straight out of university and appearing in her first film; she was cast only days before principal photography started. Toby Stephens, son of Dame Maggie Smith, was cast as the villain. John Cleese, introduced in The World Is Not Enough as Q's replacement-in-training, took on the role of Q after Desmond Llewelyn's death. Michael Madsen got a small part as Jinx's NSA superior, and Madonna, who sang the title song, became the first song performer to get a cameo role in the film.



The film was shot with product placement from a full twenty paying companies. The good news is that with the expiration of the BMW placement agreement, Aston Martin returned to the Bond series with the V12 Vanquish. The extensive product placement drew criticism, as did Bond's invisible Vanquish -- even Roger Moore pronounced it too much -- and perceived disrespect to South Koreans incited protest in that market.

The film debuted in only the second Bond premiere attended by Her Majesty the Queen. Despite mixed reviews and significant criticism that the film had devolved into a ludicrous, mindless action film, it was the most financially successful Bond movie yet, not accounting for inflation. With Brosnan's contract now up, it proved to be his last outing as James Bond.

Plot

Bond infiltrates North Korea to impersonate an arms trader delivering conflict diamonds in exchange for black-market weaponry sold by Colonel Moon. Moon's assistant Zao detects Bond as an impostor, and Bond escapes capture and chases Moon, who goes over a waterfall before Bond is captured by General Moon, the colonel's father, and imprisoned. Bond undergoes over a year of torture before being traded for Zao due to suspicion that Bond has leaked information, which he hasn't. Rather than sit in captivity with his 00 status revoked, Bond escapes custody in Hong Kong and starts his own investigation into the source of the information Zao used to identify him.



Bond goes to Havana, where Zao was last spotted. He meets Jinx, an NSA agent, and finds Zao undergoing gene therapy in a Cuban clinic designed to give him a new identity. Zao escapes with the procedure incomplete, but leaves behind more diamonds, these with the mark of Gustav Graves's Icelandic diamond mine. Bond goes to see the newly-minted billionaire Graves and confronts him about the conflict diamonds being passed off as mined in Iceland. They swordfight because swordfights are cool.

M takes Bond back into MI6 and restores his 00 status, sending him off to Graves's new demonstration in Iceland. Miranda Frost, Graves's personal assistant and an undercover MI6 agent, is to provide backup. There, Graves reveals his Icarus satellite, designed to reflect light back to Earth. Jinx is also there, and is captured while infiltrating Graves's operation. Bond rescues Jinx, and realizes that Graves is Colonel Moon after magic DNA therapy, but is captured when Frost reveals herself as a triple agent actually loyal to Graves. Bond escapes once more, kills Zao in a car duel, and rescues Jinx from her ice hotel room where she had been left to drown as the concentrated Icarus beam melts the ice palace.

Bond and Jinx then board Graves's plane in Korea, where he reveals his identity and his plan to use Icarus to sweep the DMZ clean for a North Korean invasion of South Korea to his father. General Moon tries to have his son arrested, but Graves-Moon kills him instead and goes forward with the plan. Bond fights Graves-Moon while Jinx duels Frost. Both the good guys win, and Graves's control system for Icarus is destroyed, shutting off the beam. Bond and Jinx escape the crashing plane with the diamond stash and go have sex.

Bond himself



Well, uh . . . there's not a whole lot to learn about Bond from this movie. It's far too caught up in referencing prior movies and including all the blockbuster bombast it can to bother with things like character. The only time Brosnan gets to go outside the suave straightjacket is in the captivity aspect -- but even that is mostly in the credits sequence, and the momentary blip of a disheveled, bearded Bond discombobulated by his circumstances is gone too quickly to make much of an impact on the film. The captivity fails to really inform that movie -- it gives him a vague motivation, but there's never a real sense that he's yearning for personal vengeance for his betrayal, or that his fourteen-month torture has done anything to change his nature or inform his character. It's all the same old Brosnan Bond, and Brosnan plays Bond's suave indifference so hard that it comes out as almost total detachment from anything going on in the movie. Or maybe he'd just checked out on the role at that point. In either case, the result is supremely bland.

How it fits into the series

This is the nadir of the Brosnan era. A mindless, joyless, dull blockbuster that puts spectacle and recognizable Bond elements over character, story, atmosphere, or the actual spirit of James Bond. Thankfully, it was also the last of that era, giving way to an infinitely superior take on Bond that finally went ahead and rebooted the franchise. Hopefully, Die Another Day's legacy is that of the very last hurrah for the bad old days of cheesy, stupid, misguided Bond flicks, but I'm not too hopeful.



This film is definitely the last hurrah for Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Sadly, he never got scripts good enough to let him do what he wanted with the character, but he also failed to do anything to elevate the mediocre material he was given, unlike Dalton or even Connery. He played to the level of the script. Unfortunately, the result was a Moore-esque superficial take on Bond capering its way through a series of weak films.

With the exception of Dame Judi Dench, this also represents the last hurrah for Brosnan's supporting cast. Samantha Bond's Moneypenny did not return. Charles Robinson, a top M aide played by Colin Salmon, also did not return after being used in the last three Brosnan films as Bill Tanner's stand-in or, in TWINE, complement. Other recurring Brosnan supporters, such as Michael Kitchen's Tanner and Joe Don Baker's Jack Wade, had already made their final appearances. John Cleese got perhaps the roughest treatment of all, with his debut as Desmond Llewelyn's successor as Q turning out to be his one and only turn in the role.

Review

Absolutely dreadful. As the Bond films often are when they're at their worst, Die Another Day is yet another terminally boring resort to empty formula, a waste of $142,000,000 on complete nothingness. The writing is total hackery, the direction looks like a bad music video, the acting is embarrassing . . . on every level of filmmaking, Die Another Day is a massive, spectacular failure.

The pre-credits scene is decent, insofar as the hovercraft are a nice new action element, Will Yun Lee is the only actor playing a villain in the entire movie who can actually act, and "Find me a new anger therapist" is the only joke in the movie that comes close to landing. It, like all the rest of the film, however, is undermined by overreliance on bad CGI. It's interesting to have a credits sequence that tries to tell a story, though the title song is easily the worst of all time. Having Bond be a captive is interesting, too, but we don't really see anything meaningful out of it, and it results in a stupid "Bond on the run" plot that doesn't do anything. The one halfway decent idea the film has, it just flat-out squanders.



After that, we don't have to worry about good ideas anymore. Bond escapes MI6 custody because thinking about his torture makes him die or something, except not really. Great scene. Compelling and rich. Then we get DNA therapy? Really? Not just plastic surgery, but "Hey, we'll change your DNA out with different DNA!"? This really is the ultimate in bombastic stupidity. Bond sort of wanders through a vague haze in the early going, seeking Zao and whoever set him up, but then when he finds Graves, seemingly Moon's Western connection, he and M both appear to forget entirely about the fact that someone sold Bond out to Moon, and completely ignore the fact that the MI6 agent working for Graves would be suspect number one. No, let's fill her in on the whole mission and send her off! Then Bond gets an invisible car. I'll just let that sit there for a bit. And it's not just the structural writing that's stupid – the actual dialogue is even worse. It's nothing but a massive, endless succession of incredibly crappy bottom-drawer puns. You'd have to be ten years old to find any of the incredibly lazy jokes and puns remotely funny, and even then it's a crapshoot.

All the characters are awful. Bond is an empty shell, and Brosnan has checked out, sleepwalking through the role. Jinx is even worse, a repository for fourth-rate "sassy" dialogue – she gets the worst "Yo mama" in possibly all of cinema, and "Read this! . . . bitch," even for as badly misconceived as it is, is still one of the most hilariously bungled deliveries I've ever seen – acted with such incompetence by Halle Berry that it's impossible to fathom that she actually won an Oscar at the same time she was filming this garbage. Toby Stephens and Rick Yune are stunningly bland villains. Yune's Zao is yet another generic henchman, all carefully practiced "I am in a bad mood" leers and no personality. Stephens's Graves is even worse, a bland-looking, bland-acting charisma vacuum. He's a walking sneer and absolutely nothing else. No presence at all. Miranda Frost is halfway to being a decent character, and Rosamund Pike doesn't fail at acting like most of the rest of the cast, but her motivation is so earth-shatteringly stupid that it kind of ruins the character. At least Cleese's new Q is better written this time, and he basically works even if "poor man's Desmond Llewelyn" wasn't the right angle to go for a replacement.

Let's see, what else sucks about this film? Graves's asinine-looking armor/VR suit/whatever thing. Moneypenny apparently programming a simulation to masturbate at the office. The magical disappearing guests at the ice hotel, which when it melts apparently floods one room and one room only. The "thrilling" sequence in which Bond goes very fast in a straight line while some light goes behind him, and then there's some awful CGI and he parachute-surfs away. The part where Frost locks Jinx up to die, then goes back and opens the door so she can say, "Haha, you're going to die," and closes it again. The garbage-looking, nonsensical laser fight. Lee Tamahori's ****house direction, which looks like a twelve-year-old trying to mimic Zack Snyder without any understanding of what effect ramping actually has as a film technique, or when and where to employ it, if at all. Bond yet again just walking up to the villain and giving away his hand for no perceptible reason and no possible gain.



Is there anything else to like? I sort of liked the consternation of the Chinese film crew when Bond caught them. A few seconds of the ice car chase were cool, a few seconds of the Blades duel were cool, and the part of the finale with scantily clad women swordfighting has some minimal, uh, artistic value.

The long and the short of it is that DAD is a total disaster. It has almost nothing going for it; it's a failure at every step of the filmmaking process. It's rife with unbearably bad writing, third-rate acting, and incompetent direction. Nothing in it works, very little comes even close to working, and it's not even so outrageously retro-cheesy as to be fun. It's one of the Bond series' greatest misfires for sure, and it's an even bigger disappointment when you consider the total lack of excuses for this misbegotten failure. Ugh ugh ugh.

Rankings

1. From Russia with Love
2. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
3. Licence to Kill
4. Dr. No
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. GoldenEye
7. The Living Daylights
8. The Spy Who Loved Me
9. Goldfinger
10. Thunderball
11. You Only Live Twice
12. The Man with the Golden Gun
13. The World Is Not Enough
14. Tomorrow Never Dies
15. A View to a Kill
16. Diamonds Are Forever
17. Octopussy
18. Live and Let Die
19. Die Another Day
20. Moonraker

Yeah, I know I have said that Die Another Day is the worst Bond movie ever. But that was without having both Moonraker and Die Another Day fresh in my mind and fully comprehending just how abysmal Moonraker is. Honestly, the bottom four movies are so uniformly awful that it's almost impossible to argue that any of them is "better" than anything else.

Questions for discussion

1. It seems an apt discussion at this point: which Bond film is really the worst of all time?
2. Does anyone see redeeming features in this?
3. Time once more for some overall evaluation. What, ultimately, is Pierce Brosnan's legacy as James Bond?
4. Does anyone want to revisit rankings? Bond actors, Bond girls, villains, any of that?
5. Looking forward, after four Brosnan entries that all did smashing business at the box office, what convinced the producers to move on and change their approach?

 

From the bottom of my heart: Thank you, Die Another Day.

You could have been merely diverting, like Goldeneye. Or mediocre, like TND or TWINE.

But no. You were so abysmal, so vile, so irredeemable, you managed to effectively pull the plug on a tired franchise that hadn't been vibrant since 1969. (Licence to Kill notwithstanding.) You did it! Out of your wretchedness sprang the Second Golden Age of Bond.

I cherish you. I adore your every flaw, every bat-guano insane facet. You're like the '29 Stock Market Crash, inaugurating 50 years of liberal economics. Your legacy almost makes me believe that everything happens for a reason.

Thank you.


The Bottom Five

20. Die Another Day
19. Tomorrow Never Dies
18. A View to a Kill
17. Live and Let Die
16. Moonraker

The moral? Don't put "Die" in the title, and don't cast Americans as Bond chicks.

 

Die Another Day has three good things going for it.

1) It gave us a return to Fleming, and effectively forced the modernisation of Bond films
2) It brought Aston Martin back to James Bond
3) For a brief moment; from capture until leaving Hong Kong (forgiving the heart-stopping moment) it seemed like we had a revenge thriller on our hands. Nooooope. No sir. Didn't happen. Just lied to us. Promised the earth; delivered Utah.

Sadly, it made a squillion dollars at the box office (HOW?!) and was one of the most financially successful Bond films ever.

The rest is just... ugh. Hey, let's take an Aston (made during the dark days when Ford owned AML, and used bits from the Focus on the AM Vanquish. Seriously, Americans, you don't make luxury. We don't either. So let the grown ups handle it?) - and make it invisible. And fight a Jaguar. Gosh that's smart. Think of the toys!

 

Guys, really? This is a completely overwrought assessment of the film.

1. The theme song was probably the first (the second being Skyfall) that didn't sound someone taken massive quantities of LSD on the heels of being beat in the head with sledgehammer. Sounds that are actually recognizable as music are a good thing, even if it's just sort of mildly garbage-y pop.

2. The sword fighting was cool

3. It dealt with his captivity about as much as Skyfall did. That is, there were a few passing references to him having lost his touch, and then for the most part he was the same as always.

4. I don't see where the villain's plot is fundamentally that much more ridiculous than the other stuff we've covered in this thread.

5. The action sequences were mindless, but enjoyable enough while they were on screen. I wouldn't spend a lot of time watching them personally, but as above, I don't see how it's really that different than the other stuff James Bond does.

 

I remember passing up the opportunity to see this in theaters so I could see Harry Potter 2. Despite Harry Potter 2 being pretty crappy I ultimately felt redemption when I eventually saw Die Another Day on DVD.

 

Did Another Day.......

















.........
yeah. i am laughing here,


Catchy title. Worthy of Bond.

The song is catchy, but do not understand why Madonna is in the film.

The film itself for some reason seems to call back to previous Bond films, particularly Diamonds are Forever and Goldfinger.

• The ejector seat from Goldfinger
• the facial reconstruction/face-off of Gustav Graves is similar to Blofeld from Diamonds are forever.
• Giant Diamond Laser in the sky that attacks places on Earth similar to Diamonds are Forever laser.
• Bond Villain is sucked out of airplane window similar to Goldfinger
• The laser scene....oh god, the laser scene.

there is that. Started off so well, then like, WHAT THE ***** HAPPENED?!?!?! Could have been a good revenge story, but it just fell flat.

Jinx, played by Halle Berry, was rather subpar compared to the other bond girl played by Rosamund Pike. Even though the latter was nothing special either.

 

I would still rank this movie as better than Tomorrow Never Dies, but not by much.

 

see, for me, i would rank it better than TWINE. I can't stand watching that movie at all. I do not mind TMD.

 

I'll give my own updated lists. For actors:

1. Dalton
2. Good Connery
3. Lazenby
4. Good Brosnan
5. Bad Connery
6. Good Moore
7. Bad Brosnan
8. Bad Moore

Dalton is pretty much unassailable as Bond. He did it right, and when he was given weak material he elevated it through his own talents as an actor. Connery, when he cared about the role, was also pretty untouchable. He's not as perfect in the role as Dalton, but he set the tone with his tough, cold, smooth, manly Bond and he got it right. Lazenby comes in unnaturally high just because of the weakness of the rest of the pack. He wasn't all that much of an actor, but he did play Bond as a real character with emotions and got a great film out of it; he did what he had to do. Brosnan was very rarely at his best, and even then didn't quite have the menace of Dalton, Connery, or Craig, but he did at least nail Bond's charm without devolving into Moore's campiness and he did a pretty solid job as Bond. Connery when he didn't care was mediocre, a checked-out actor going through the motions, but he still holds the significant advantage of being Connery -- he still exudes charm and physicality without even trying. Connery's worst is better than any of the other inconsistent actors'. It's even better than Moore's best; Moore is just so wrong for the part, so incapable of playing Bond as a killer. At his best, when he shuts down the attempts to camp it up and goes along with a great script, he's barely acceptable; he manages to do little enough wrong to not be distracting. Most of the time, though, he's incredibly awful at portraying Bond, even worse than the zoned-out, playing-down-to-the-material zombie Brosnan is most of the time. Brosnan may be playing a caricature of Bond, but at least it's not a clownish caricature.

And now for the near-arbitrary villain rankings:

1. Blofeld (OHMSS)
2. Kristatos
3. Grant/Klebb
4. Scaramanga
5. Zorin
6. Goldfinger
7. Sanchez
8. Dr. No
9. Trevelyan
10. Jaws (TSWLM)
11. Elektra/Renard
12. Stromberg
13. Drax
14. Kananga
15. Blofeld (DAF)
16. Carver
17. Koskov/Whitaker
18. Largo
19. Orlov/Khan
20. MoonGraves
21. Jaws (Moonraker)
22. Blofeld (YOLT)

Sanchez is a great villain, but there isn't enough to him to really rank him as one of the absolute best. Perfect for his film, but as a villain, Robert Davi just isn't Robert Shaw, Christopher Lee, Christopher Walken, or Telly Savalas. He's not iconic enough. Trevelyan is, on paper, one of the best -- Sean Bean is a great actor, he plays a great villain, and Trevelyan's setup as Bond's friend turned enemy, one of the only opponents to match him skill for skill since Scaramanga. The problem is that Trevelyan just isn't used well enough to rank much higher; too much of his potential is left offscreen, and he ends up coming off too generic. Carver is an awful villain in concept, but Jonathan Pryce at least plays him with some aplomb, so he ends up with a mediocre ranking rather than an absymal one. Elektra isn't an all-time villain, but she's quite good. She's brought down by the ultra-generic Renard, whose blandness distracts from the unique vibe Elektra has going on. Moon/Graves/Whatever is just awful. He could hardly be any worse. Insanely boring, badly acted, just embarrassing all around.

 

This. Fact of science.

 

It's a shame to see such acting talent wasted in a movie like DAD. Toby Stephens is a decent actor and I think did OK with what he had but he didn't really do anything and his mecha-suit with the stupid chest button made no sense, Rosamund Pike & Halle Berry were only really there to look good which both can do without really trying. But they were never developed in the way say a character like Vesper was in Casino Royale. Dench was fine as she always has been in Bond, Brosnan's only moment of quality is when he is captured and tortured at the beginning which sadly didn't last.

The Aston Martin looked nice as they always do and had the traditional Bond gadgetry & the ice fight is a pretty cool scene. But it didn't need to be invisible, that just went way too sci-fi and outside of the entire point of trying to get people to believe that a super-spy could have such equipment in reality (Top Gear tried the invisible car idea in a similar way to DAD, it didn't really work).

The Icarus Death Star Laser Satellite of Doom thing was also way too far in the realms of crazy.

The swordfight between Graves & Bond is good, but that's not very much of the movie. And yes the theme song is not bad, but Madonna didn't need to be in the movie.

 

1. It seems an apt discussion at this point: which Bond film is really the worst of all time?

Tomorrow Never Dies. Or, y'know, License to Kill (j/k, just trollin', ya'll!)

2. Does anyone see redeeming features in this?

Yes. I will detail below.

3. Time once more for some overall evaluation. What, ultimately, is Pierce Brosnan's legacy as James Bond?

It's an interesting question. He cetainly looked like Bond, more than Moore did -- but I'd say even Moore acted like Bond more than Brosnan did as Generic Action Bond in most cases (The World is Not Enough and like two scenes of Goldeneye, aside).

Ultimately, I think the legacy might be: looked the part and partook in profitable but empty, formulaic Bond films.

4. Does anyone want to revisit rankings? Bond actors, Bond girls, villains, any of that?

Dalton -> Connery -> Moore -> Lazenby -> Brosnan

5. Looking forward, after four Brosnan entries that all did smashing business at the box office, what convinced the producers to move on and change their approach?

I think, ultimately, people need to stop looking at overall box office. It's a crappy way of comparison.

They probably looked on what they were getting for their return on investment. For example, as I noted before, as a fun fact: Skyfall, while beating every single Brosnan film in cost to worldwide gross ratio... is just about half as much as every Moore film, except A View To A Kill, with which it did approximately the same business. Let that sink in a moment.

Brosnans films... terribly performed. The international market is what saved them in all cases, as TWINE didn't even make back its production budget domestically. It's not a coincidence that, as we entered the Brosnan era and "brand management," that the movies all successively made more money than the previous. From Goldeneye to Skyfall, each one outperformed exactly the one before it in absolute gross... but not return on investment.

Nothing will ever top Connery's return on investment in the role. Nothing. Which is why I'm a little surprised we're not looking at another actor change soon and plucking someone much less famous to lock them up for a six-film deal at a reasonable rate and keep production costs down. So long as the story is good and the acting passable it will do well, especially abroad.

******************************************
So, back to Die Another Day. Now, I admit this isn't the greatest of Bonds, but I think it works better than people think. So, here are the redeeming features:

It's fun!

It may not work as a Bond film, per se, and certainly was probably the last straw in the Brosnan era for how it turned out. But it was a fun romp. And people having fun in a theater shouldn't be dismissed. And yes, the "invisible car" was silly... but it was a real, in-development thing that they ran with and just made it work with CGI.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...sts-use-LEDs-camera-create-invisible-car.html

The 30th Anniversary Items

Yes, there's a lot of "Pop-Up Video"-like qualities to how all of the items from the previous Bond films show up, or homages in specific scenes. But, at a functional level, it kinda worked. At least in my opinion. Also, the concept of MI5 having underground depots like that actually does dovetail nicely with what we see in Skyfall. So there's that.

The Larger Spy World

The one thing the Brosnan films did do was expand on the spy world a bit, beyond just appealing to the US market with the Bond / CIA (Leiter, etc.) connections. Moore's Bond also did this with the Russians somewhat, but Brosnan had the Wade character, Zukofsky's character, etc. all as part of a bigger world where every area has spies and they generally know each other by reputation or sight and it's not always an "us vs. them" thing. "Professional courtesy" as Bond would say.
And that's one of the elements that carries over here I think that worked; not the North Korean part, but the Hong Kong part. It's a short sequence, but Bond going to the Hong Kong hotel where he knows their spies watch him, so he can make contact... because he knows they don't want any part of the North Korean plot.

Look... it's not the greatest film, I know that. But I irrationally like it a lot more than some other Bond films. At least I know it's irrational, right?

 

That begs the question: Is there any hope for a relatively small-scale 007 film? Something along the lines of Casino Royale's second act, extended to two hours? If the film boasted memorable characters, people would certainly see it, and the profit margin may actually exceed what they're seeing now.

 

Fun fact: The Bourne Identity cost like 40% of Die Another Day and was released the same year. If Bond films had a Bourne budget and Bond returns, it'd be back in Moore-levels and surpass every Craig film, including Skyfall.

Even more fun fact: the most RECENT Bourne film, in 2012, didn't cost more than Die Another Day.

 

40th anniversary dp. Not 30th. And 20th film.anniversary so much waste...

Ritchie, the car fight was idotic. Loud, noisy, all sound and fury and no depth.

 

I kind of love this movie, honestly. In addition to four of Wocky's points (I'm not overly fond of the theme song, to put it lightly), it's so stupid I have to love it. I mean, there's a North Korean general who gets plastic surgery to pretend to be an English aristocrat so that he can use a giant solar gun to... I don't even remember, but there was a goddamn robot suit and the climax took place in a plane whose cabin is the size of my parents' house. I mean, Christ, if I had to pick a formula for perfection in the field of goofy action plots I'd go with something like that. It's unfortunately slow at times (Mostly all the crap in the ice hotel that doesn't involve needless car stunts) but I'm generally entertained throughout.

And god help me I love those utterly soulless "Look it's the [object]" shout-outs.

 

The product placement was worse than the conspicuous references to the film's history. Buy Another Day, more like it.

However Ramza the above renders you either dead to me, or in a near death coma from which you may not awake. I haven't figured it out yet; I'm still coping with crushing disappointment. After all, I expected better of you, and quite reasonably so.

 

No, I think such an expectation would be quite unreasonable if you read some of my Moore assessments.

 

I actually like it better than the previous two. At the start of Goldeneye, when Bond uses the laser torch to cut open a hatch after the bungee jump, I realised my hopes of a gritty, more realistic Bond were just never going to happen with Brosnan; what we got with TND and TWINE was the studio playing it safe in the middle ground, neither realistic nor big fantasy, but a gutless half-hearted stab trying to please everybody. At least with DAD they really picked a direction and ran with it: big, stupid fantasy action.

I rarely watch the whole movie when it's on the TV - I try and tune in for the sword fight, then I drift off... but at least there's a sequence I think is worth catching. With TND and TWINE I just can't be bothered. That said, it's still just a collection of action set-pieces . Roll on Casino Royale.